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I combined 7 Godox AD200 lights to make a huge 1400Ws cluster light

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Like most photographers who have been working for many years, I have my favorite, go-to lights. These include the Broncolor Para 88, 133, and 222; the Broncolor ‘pre-2006 style’ Flooters; the Elinchrom Zoom Spots; and Elinchrom Litemotiv Indirect.

I have adapted all of these modifiers within the last year to fit the Flashpoint 1200H remote heads, as well as the 600Pro (AKA Godox AD600 Pro) and 600H Pro, as I prefer these mobile, lightweight, HSS capable flashes for the flexibility they provide over any other current brands or models.

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Learn these five basic one-light patterns to improve your studio portraits

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You don’t have to be new to photography to be new to studio lighting. In this video, Jeff Rojas will help you learn some of the basics fast. He discusses five essential studio lighting patterns, and knowing them will help you improve and add versatility to your studio portraits. And the best thing is – you can achieve all of them using just one light.

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How to use your LED modelling lamp for long exposure photography

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Long exposure photography is tricky, especially in the studio when you’re trying to combine multiple light sources within a single frame that have very different brightnesses and colour temperatures etc.

So although I believe this article will be very useful to many of you, there will most certainly be others that perhaps have little to no experience with long exposure photography and as such this article might seem to brush over certain long exposure lighting ideas.

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What fans to use and how to use them for blowing hair in the studio

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Using fans to blow hair is one of the most effective ways to add a little life to a portrait or headshot. But it’s not easy. It’s not as simple as just throwing a fan, ramping up the power and hoping for the best – although that’s the method that seems to be most commonly used.

There are potential issues with blowing air at your subject’s head, though. In this video from photographer Joe Edelman, we learn what some of those problems are, and how we can get around them.

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How to fix colour banding with gel modifiers

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For those of us that have dealt with colour in any way digitally in the last decade, we are unfortunately all too familiar with the dreaded colour banding issues. If you’re not sure what colour banding is, then it’s the visual ‘stepping’ of colour that happens in digital files.

It happens a lot and it can happen for any number of reasons. The most common scapegoats for colour banding are usually poor colour depth in our cameras, aggressive compression algorithms with online sites and any number of other technical failings. Although all of these are often part of the problem, I see one other major culprit of severe colour banding and that’s lighting.

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Organise your studio or set with this DIY equipment cart

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Equipment cards for use in the studio or on-set can be expensive. REALLY expensive. Of course, those carts often need to hold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. For a small studio or low budget set, though, you don’t need to go to such expense. There are many other alternatives out there that can work just as well that you can customise for your own needs.

In this video from the guys at The Film Look, we see how they organise their own DIY equipment cart. Based off a standard $69 utility cart, it’s very functional after a little tweaking and customisation. And it allows you to keep all your kit organised on set so that you know where everything is, as well as give you a mobile tabletop for gear you’re using.

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Objective & Subjective Lighting – What it is and how to do it

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Like many things in life, there’s no right or wrong way to learn photographic lighting… but I do believe there are easy ways and hard ways to not only understand it, but more importantly get better at it.

I think every creative discipline evolves, but photography sees more significant jumps in its evolution due to it being so uniquely tied to technology. Every frame we capture is taken with a camera and that camera technology is evolving on a daily basis. Every frame we then have to develop is primarily produced through software and that too evolves on a daily basis. The tools that we use to create our work are constantly changing but I feel that the way we learn some of the techniques associated with these tools do not.

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